Iskowitz

“Iskowitz” is a rare and intimate view of the life of the late Canadian painter Gershon Iskowitz. Born in 1921, in Kielce, Poland, Iskowitz began painting in 1941. At a time when most young men are exploring the world and discovering themselves, he was interned in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. To preserve his sanity he continued to paint, bribing guards for the coffee grounds he then used to create his ink. When the camp was liberated at the end of the war, Iskowitz retrieved his artwork, which had survived by being stashed under floorboards. It took him two years to recover physically, having dropped to eighty pounds during his incarceration. Iskowitz emigrated to Canada alone in 1949, the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps. For almost forty years, he lived in downtown Toronto and spent many summers painting in the Parry Sound-Georgian Bay-Muskoka region. It was there that his style evolved from the dark scenes and portraits he was first known for, into the more abstract views of the landscape that would become his trademark. This film contains a wide representation of Gershon’s works, from his earliest surviving sketches of the concentration camps to his last work, before his death at age 67 in 1988.